Looking for some fun this weekend? Poetry-type fun?

If you’re looking for poetry-type action this weekend in Seattle, well, you’re in luck.

Open Books. 3 PM Sunday Sunday Sunday. Origami cranes! Japanese candy! Monster Trucks!
Well…maybe no monster trucks. But I will be doing my first Seattle reading of my new book, She Returns to the Floating World. I’m nervous. I’m picking poems, some of which I’m reading out loud for the first time.

Here’s one of them, inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Hope to see you there!

Love Story (with Fire Demon and Tengu)

Maybe in this version you are a bird, and I have become an old woman. Maybe you ate a falling star. It’s hard to love someone in a castle—they always feel distant. I will open a flower shop and learn to speak German, take to wearing ruffled dresses and straw hats. You’d like to pin me down, but you could tell my feet weren’t touching the ground. I called your name over and over, but you couldn’t hear me above the din of the bombers. It was like movies of wartime Japan. I looked up and there were planes bulging with smoke.

The blue sky kept getting darker –
sometimes, I thought,
with your shadow.

In the end, I have a dog in my arms and a scarecrow for a friend, but I never make it to Kansas. The field is wet and stormy, I kiss three men goodnight for their magic. The door to your childhood is opening for me. It allows me passage into a brick wall, my fists full of shiny black feathers, the shell of an egg, the howl of cold wind against a mountain. Don’t worry, your heart is in good hands. Let me keep it a little longer; its blue glow illuminates everything.